'Love Story' and 7 Other Best Ryan Murphy TV Series, Ranked by Rotten Tomatoes
Projects from one of the most outrageous geniuses and leading showrunners of our time.
For some viewers, Ryan Murphy's name signifies aesthetics, scandal, and provocation. For others, it signifies impeccable taste and the ability to find unexpected angles in seemingly hackneyed genres.
He knows how to make projects that are discussed, hated, and adored all at once, from costume dramas to horror anthologies, from biopics to comedies.
8. 'The Politician', 2019-2020
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 51%
Payton, the main character and a student who dreams of becoming president of the US, is running for student council president. With its smear campaigns, hypocrisy, incriminating evidence, and secret coalitions, his campaign clearly echoes the strategies of big politics.
However, power plays aren't the only thing Murphy is interested in – the TV show also portrays modern youth who are obsessed with vanity and raised in an atmosphere of toxic competition.
7. 'Hollywood', 2020
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 58%
In 2020, Ryan Murphy, who is always keenly aware of pop culture trends, took on the new, popular What If? genre. He focused on the dream factory of the late 1940s and on several young filmmakers working at the fictional Ace Pictures studio.
The project imagines an alternate reality in which an ambitious aspiring director named Raymond, a screenwriter named Archie, and a young actor meet on the set of the first film starring an African-American woman in post-war America.
6. 'Ratched', 2020
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 62%
Miloš Forman could hardly have imagined that his magnum opus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, would receive a prequel from Ryan Murphy.
The project portrays one of the greatest antiheroes in the history of world cinema: the authoritarian Nurse Ratched, and tells the story of a progressive psychiatric clinic in the late 1940s.
They perform lobotomies, administer LSD, boil bodies alive, and burn them there. The nurse is hired here, and as the show progresses, she emerges not as a symbol of impersonal dictatorship, as in the original, but as a person with childhood trauma.
5. 'Nip/Tuck', 2003-2010
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 74%
In 2003, former journalist and producer Ryan Murphy released his first hit, Nip/Tuck, on FX. The show earned Murphy a Golden Globe and an Emmy.
The supposedly true story of Miami plastic surgeons now reads like a spiritual prequel to The Substance. The two projects have a lot in common: dark humor, meticulous naturalism, and glamour.
There's also a number of shared topics, including the cult of perfection, the dictatorship of beauty standards, the neuroses of aging, and self-disatisfaction.
4. 'American Horror Story', 2011-...
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 77%
Murphy pioneered the anthology format. Within a single season, there's a classic horizontal plot, as well as a new setting, characters, and cast.
Murphy's first experiment in this field was American Horror Story, a comprehensive encyclopedia of the horror genre and a detailed guide for horror filmmakers, laying out common tropes.
By jumping from one chronotope to another – a murder house in modern-day Los Angeles, a freak show in the 1950s, and a children's camp straight out of an 80s slasher film – Murphy deftly shifts styles.
3. 'Love Story', 2026
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 80%
Love Story recounts the romance between John F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the president, a failed senator, and a playboy turned publisher of the political magazine George, and Carolyn Bessette, a fashion icon and senior PR executive at Calvin Klein.
They were the most talked-about couple in America for three years – until their tragic end. In the summer of 1999, Kennedy's plane crashed while he was piloting it, killing him and Carolyn and her sister.
2. 'American Crime Story', 2016-2021
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 84%
The first season of this anthology is about the scandalous O. J. Simpson trial. The second chapter is about the police hunt for the killer of fashion designer Gianni Versace. The third season tells about the sex scandal involving Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
The series meticulously reconstructs the incidents and the media hype surrounding them. For millions of viewers, each of these stories was a multi-part news program.
Unlike the true crime anthology Monster, the series avoids lapsing into outright exploitation thanks to media criticism.
1. 'Feud', 2017-2024
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 86%
In the 1990s, Murphy was a columnist for EW and the Los Angeles Times. He has always been interested in the behind-the-scenes scandals of show business. This curiosity led him to create the anthology series Feud, which chronicles the entertainment industry's most high-profile conflicts.
The first season chronicles the feud between retired Hollywood divas Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, who joined the psycho-thriller What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in hopes of recapturing their former glory, only to fall out with each other.
The second season moves to 1970s New York. After publishing the opening chapters of his novel Answered Prayers, in which he caricatured his socialite friends, Truman Capote immediately fell out of favor.
